Archdiocese of St. Louis

The Archdiocese of St. Louis is one of the largest Catholic dioceses in the United States.

While I was employed by the Archdiocese, one of the largest projects I undertook was the redevelopment of the Archdiocese's website, http://archstl.org/. The website was built as 49 separate Joomla CMS installations prior to my arrival as the web developer. This model was unsustainable for upgrading and security patches, as well as performance problems, theme discrepancies, and a number of other flaws. Therefore, with the assistance of Palantir.net, I worked to redevelop the website with all of it's content migrated from Joomla to a single Drupal installation. (Read more about the Archdiocese of St. Louis' migration to Drupal).

The Drupal 6 website used the Organic Groups module to allow different Archdiocesan organizations to manage their own content, calendars, etc., and a new theme and content structure made the website much easier for end users to use, navigate and search. I moved the site from using a Google Custom Search Engine backend for search to using an integrated Apache Solr search server, which not only sped up site search, but helped search become more relevant, especially with the use of search filters, highlights, and suggestions.

The Drupal 6 website also integrated certain features into the Archdiocese's Catholic STL iOS app, which used data derived from the website to display and allow search of parish locations on a map, news stories from archdiocesan organizations, and the reading and submitting of moderated prayer requests.

The website is still running on the Drupal 6 base and architecture I set up, but has recently been re-themed to match new Archdiocesan design and marketing standards.